What Is the Holy Spirit's Role in Our Lives?
The Church of Christ has been torn over debates about the role of the Holy Spirit in our modern lives. The Holy Spirit should be a crucial aspect of our personal identity and Christian journey, and we shouldn't just ignore this debate because we fear controversy. Let's evaluate biblical and later Christian writings about the topic. Perhaps we can gain some additional insight.
BIBLE PASSAGES
"The Spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life." -Job 33:4
Job believed the Holy Spirit both created and sustained him. The Spirit wasn't just a force outside the natural world, it was a force keeping things animated and alive.
"If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you." -John 14:15-17
The same Spirit that created and sustained Job was poured out on Christians who accepted his indwelling. The Spirit of truth stops our weak minds from being deceived by the Satanic spirits circulating in the world today. Jesus said the Holy Spirit would dwell within us and help us. God's Spirit moved out of the temple at Jerusalem and entered the new temple of God's church. We're the temples of God. This parallels Jesus' statements to the Samaritan women that men would cease worshiping God in the temple or on mountains. However, the way we retain our purified status as temples is by keeping Jesus' commands. If we continue to disobey Jesus' commands God will eventually leave us as he left the Israelites.
"And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him." -Acts 5:32
The indwelling of the Holy Spirit witnesses that we belong to Christ. During the final judgement, the proof of our temple status will be the Holy Spirit's presence within us. Furthermore, we can believe in the truth because the Holy Spirit persuades us from within.
"And Peter said to them, 'Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.'" -Acts 2:38
The gift of the Holy Spirit was given to everyone who repented and was baptized. If we've repented, been baptized, and follow Christ's commandments than we too share in the gift of the Holy Spirit.
"And hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us." -Romans 5:5
We're able to retain hope because the constant presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives proves that we do not hope in vain.
"You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him." -Romans 8:9
There are some who claim the Holy Spirit does not indwell Christians, but Paul clearly wrote that the Spirit lives inside every Christian. If a Christian doesn't have the Spirit within him than he isn't a Christian. The Spirit's presence proves our salvation.
"For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God." -Romans 8:14
As long as we remain faithful followers of Christ we can be confident our actions and lives are being led by the Holy Spirit. All things work together to good for them that love God.
"Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words." -Romans 8:26
Humans, even Christians, are too naïve and stupid to pray properly. There are uncalculatable things we don't know. We're dominated by ignorance and weakness. No one can learn even half of what's currently available on the internet, and the new information we learn about the universe doubles every year. The long term results of our actions are impossible to calculate. The slightest gesture may lead to a planetary revolution in a century's time. The Holy Spirit is the mediator between us and God, and he supplements our pathetic abilities.
"May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope." -Romans 15:13
There's something in the Holy Spirit's power that can bring us peace and hope. However, it's likely we often close ourselves off to this hope by allowing anxiety and fear to dominate our living patterns.
"Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him. For God's temple is holy, and you are that temple." -1 Corinthians 3:16-17
The Holy Spirit resides within us just as he resided in the temple and tabernacle. We're the new sacred center of civilization. The mountains and high places of the ancient pagans have been replaced by the living centers of God's saints. We're the connection between heaven and earth. Our lives are sacred time (Mircea Eliade).
"Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own," -1 Corinthians 6:19
Once again, Paul emphasized the immanent personal indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is within us and working. We're no longer sovereigns over ourselves, we forfeited our independence when we allowed the Holy Spirit to dwell in us. Freedom is overrated. Either we're slaves to Satan or slaves to God, but we can't be both. To assert ones' religious liberty is to be a naïve slave to the corrupt worldly zeitgeist.
"For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit." -1 Corinthians 12:15
The Holy Spirit operates within us as individuals and as a collective. We participate in a universal kingdom crossing every nation and socioeconomic class for the furtherance of God's will. Just like every other civilization and nation, the Kingdom of God contains within it a heterogeneous group of talents and personalities, but we're united by our common vertical connection to heaven through the Spirit.
"Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit." -2 Corinthians 3:17-18
The Lord's Spirit is forging us from within. We're like men and women who read the same book every day and slowly our thoughts and actions become honed by that book and its worldview. We're all being slowly remade as the Spirit forces us to look steadily at the example of Christ.
"And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, 'Abba! Father!'" -Galatians 4:6
Jesus' Spirit cried out for his God and father, and the same Spirit that was in Christ is now in us. We're crying out for our father as we live and die for him. We're fulfilling his will in the world as Jesus did.
"In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory." -Ephesians 1:13
We struggle every day in this fallen world. We feel the pain and limitations of our dying mortal bodies. Within us, however, is the Holy Spirit. It's the proof that God owes us something his son paid for. God recognizes us because he recognizes the Spirit of his son dwelling within us. It's almost like the software imprint of our phones as they operate within the digital cloud. We have proof of our connection with God through the Holy Spirit.
"And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit," -Ephesians 5:18
The Spirit fills and controls us just as alcohol has the potential to control us and effect our lives and actions.
"He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior," -Titus 3:5-6
The Holy Spirit is washing us, purifying us, regenerating us, and renewing us every day. The road to heaven may seem like a roller coaster of ups and downs, but we should remain confident that the end result will be the adequate purification of ourselves for the coming age.
THE MODERN PROBLEM
The New Testament gives us a fairly clear understanding of the Holy Spirit's work in providing us assistance, forging us into Christ like beings, and serving as a seal proving we belong to God. However, the modern Churches of Christ are deeply divided on the work of the Holy Spirit. Many, especially conservatives, seem to think the Holy Spirit's work in the modern world has completely ceased. They advocate a nearly deistic worldview in which spiritual influences have almost totally withdrawn from the physical world and left us in a materialist wasteland devoid of spiritual activity. These people deny the Holy Spirit indwells Christians and seek to reinterpret the Spirit's role as having finishing after the biblical documents were written. To these deistic Church of Christers humanity has been abandoned with a book that allegedly compensates for God's absence. Many of these functional deists allow for something they call God's "providential" assistance, but when questioned on the workings of this providential mechanism they provide only vague qualifiers about how it's "not miraculous" and occurs through natural laws.
RESTORATION LEADERS ON THE HOLY SPIRIT
To help us understand our Church of Christ perspective on this topic we should appeal to our ancestors and past preachers for insight. The following quotes come from various nineteenth century Restoration figures. The majority of them seem to have believed the Holy Spirit was active in our daily lives.
Alexander Campbell: "after our new birth, the Holy Spirit is shed on us richly through Jesus Christ our Saviour; of which the peace of mind, the love, the joy, and the hope of the regenerate is full proof; for these are amongst the fruits of that Holy Spirit of promise of which we speak."
Barton W Stone: "The preachers were revived. I saw them filled with the Holy Spirit of their Lord, addressing the multitudes, not in Iceberg style, nor according to the studied rules of rhetoric and oratory; but in the language and spirit of heaven." Stone also believed and counseled his followers that preaching without the Spirit inspiration was dangerous.
Walter Scott: "But mark, reader, that there is no member of the body of Christ in whom the Holy Spirit dwelleth not; for it will hold good at the end of the world and in eternity as it does now, and it holds as good now as it did on the day of Pentecost and afterwards, that 'if any man have not the Spirit of Christ he is none of his.'"
David Lipscomb: "The leading is both internal and external. To whatever extent the Holy Spirit by its indwelling strengthens the human spirit to enable it to control the flesh, to that extent the leading is internal; to whatever extent the motives of 'the law of the Spirit,' when brought to bear on the heart in the New Testament, enlighten and strengthen, and so enable it to keep the body in subjection, to that extent the leading is external. The leading, then, consists of the whole of the influences of every kind exercised by the Holy Spirit on the human spirit, enabling it to keep the body under." Lipscomb's opinion was echoed by Moses Lard, JW Shephard, JM McGarvey, Philip Pendleton, and Robert Milligan.
As far as I can tell, the deistic idea that the Holy Spirit inspired the Bible and left humanity to work out its own problems only emerged as a common theological belief in the twentieth century. It was championed by so called conservatives who wanted to distance themselves from the rising Charismatic movement and signal an acceptable opinion to the scientific community. In it's present form, the deistic interpretation of the Holy Spirit's work emerged in the nineteen sixties with Foy E Wallace.
"In 1966 Wallace argued in a series of articles published by the Firm Foundation that what the Holy Spirit does the Word of God does. Wallace viewed the expression 'gift of the Holy Spirit' from Acts 2:38 as in the possessive case. Thus the 'gift of the Holy Spirit' did not mean the personal indwelling of the Holy Spirit but the Holy Spirit's gift which he believed were 'the blessings of the Holy Spirit's dispensation for the Jew and the Gentile.' Wallace believed that the Holy Spirit did not dwell in the Christian personally but representatively through the Word of God which is to dwell richly in each Christian. Wallace opposed the idea that there was a personal indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Wallace's work on the Holy Spirit was published in 1967 as a 120 page booklet under the title, The Mission and Medium of the Holy Spirit."The deistic interpretation is pushed most strongly today by those associated with the Memphis School of Preaching. Many of the figures emanating from that institution are militantly against the "false doctrine" of the Holy Spirit indwelling Christians. However, both the Bible and the long history of Christianity overwhelmingly support some continued form of active Holy Spirit indwelling.